panthervsphpscraper
Panther is a convenient standalone library to scrape websites and to run end-to-end tests using real browsers.
Panther is super powerful. It leverages the W3C's WebDriver protocol to drive native web browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.
Panther is very easy to use, because it implements Symfony's popular BrowserKit and DomCrawler APIs, and contains all the features you need to test your apps. It will sound familiar if you have ever created a functional test for a Symfony app: as the API is exactly the same! Keep in mind that Panther can be used in every PHP project, as it is a standalone library.
Panther automatically finds your local installation of Chrome or Firefox and launches them, so you don't need to install anything else on your computer, a Selenium server is not needed!
In test mode, Panther automatically starts your application using the PHP built-in web-server. You can focus on writing your tests or web-scraping scenario and Panther will take care of everything else.
Features:
- executes the JavaScript code contained in webpages
- supports everything that Chrome (or Firefox) implements
- allows taking screenshots
- can wait for asynchronously loaded elements to show up
- lets you run your own JS code or XPath queries in the context of the loaded page
- supports custom Selenium server installations
- supports remote browser testing services including SauceLabs and BrowserStack
PHPScraper is a universal web-util for PHP. The main goal is to get stuff done instead of getting distracted with selectors, preparing & converting data structures, etc. Instead, you can just go to a website and get the relevant information for your project.
PHPScraper is a minimalistic scraper framework that is built on top of other popular scraping tools.
Features:
- Direct access to page basic features like: Meta data, Links, Images, Headings, Content, Keywords etc.
- File downloading.
- RSS, Sitemap and other feed processing.
- CSV, XML and JSON file processing.
Example Use
<?php
use Symfony\Component\Panther\Client;
require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php'; // Composer's autoloader
$client = Client::createChromeClient();
// Or, if you care about the open web and prefer to use Firefox
$client = Client::createFirefoxClient();
$client->request('GET', 'https://api-platform.com'); // Yes, this website is 100% written in JavaScript
$client->clickLink('Get started');
// Wait for an element to be present in the DOM (even if hidden)
$crawler = $client->waitFor('#installing-the-framework');
// Alternatively, wait for an element to be visible
$crawler = $client->waitForVisibility('#installing-the-framework');
echo $crawler->filter('#installing-the-framework')->text();
$client->takeScreenshot('screen.png'); // Yeah, screenshot!
// create scraper object
$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;
// go to URL
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/content/selectors.html');
// elements can be found using XPath:
echo $web->filter("//*[@id='by-id']")->text(); // "Content by ID"
// or pre-defined variables covering basic page data:
$web->links; // for all links
$web->headings;
$web->images;
$web->contentKeywords;
$web->orderedLists;
$web->unorderedLists;
$web->paragraphs;
$web->outline; // basic page outline
$web->cleanOutlineWithParagraphs; // basic page outline